In recent years, there has been an exponential growth in the use and provision of wireless telephony services, such as cellular and PCS services. With such growth, a mobile unit such as a cellular telephone may traverse different geographic regions, obtaining telecommunication services from a wide variety of service providers utilizing a wide variety of equipment.
In addition, with the advent of increasingly sophisticated mobile telecommunication services, there is a growing need to maintain control over calls to and from mobile units, such as cellular telephones, at a central location. Such central control is especially important for the implementation of advanced calling features such as call waiting, call forwarding on busy, and three-way calling. Such central control should also utilize advanced networking capability, such as use of packet networks such as asynchronous transfer mode (“ATM”) packet networks or Internet protocol (“IP”) packet networks.
As a consequence, a need remains for an apparatus, method and system to provide for maintaining call control, for both incoming and outgoing calls, at a designated mobile switching center, utilizing a packet network. The apparatus, method and system should also provide the capability to implement advanced calling features in a mobile environment, such as call waiting or three-way calling, without utilizing additional circuit switched network links such as trunk lines. The apparatus, method and system should also provide for increased network efficiency, increased ease of implementation of advanced calling features, conservation of circuit switched network resources, and capability of implementation in utilizing existing network equipment.